From stock prices to personal fitness goals, benchmarks are an essential tool to help us understand how well we are performing. The greater the intelligence of the benchmark, the more we tend to rely on it. For example, a running app that provides goals tailored to our age and physique is likely to be a more relatable and therefore compelling motivator.

Benchmarks also play a big part in the way we present insights in Peakon. Whether you’re a team lead wanting to understand your team in comparison to your peers, or a CEO wanting to learn how your company’s culture stands out in the industry.

Today we’re taking this a big step forward, with the launch of True Benchmark® – a personalised benchmark for every manager that understands your team and enables you to measure the true impact of your leadership and working culture.

Is your engagement survey leading you astray?

Some intriguing general trends around engagement that cannot be observed through individual surveys:

Employees are typically most engaged during their first year at a company.

Sales and customer services are roles that inherently provide employees with the greatest clarity towards their goals.

Across the broad base of companies using the Peakon platform, we can see trends in how demographics and occupations affect engagement beyond the influence of individual managers or company cultures.

Engagement surveys of the past have never accounted for these biases, but they could have real-world implication.

Take the example of employees being most engaged during their first year at a company. Consider how this could be reflected in a company’s overall engagement score, with a significant boost in engagement for a company with many new employees.

A most common reason for a company to hire many new employees is often high attrition – an outcome of an company not able to engage its employees. Therefore the high engagement scores at a point in time could be masking the real issues that lead to the company’s hiring spree.

With True Benchmark®, Peakon will now create a benchmark that accounts for these general trends – in this case calculating a higher benchmark for a team or company with many new hires. In doing so, it’s possible to avoid common misconceptions and more accurately understand the state of engagement.

Comparing apples with apples

By understanding these general trends around tenure, age, gender, occupation, seniority, and office location and combining this with the demographic data of each team in an organisation, we can create a tailored benchmark.

By doing so, as a team leader, True Benchmark® will enable you to compare engagement in your team against a team of the same composition, so you can truly understand and address the unique needs of your employees.

For example, if you were a marketing director, with 70 percent junior employees, 30 percent managers, a large group of Millennials and a range of different tenure lengths, you’d get a benchmark based on the engagement we can expect from a team of this composition.

Information around the construction of each benchmark is made available through your Peakon dashboard. With the increased relevance of a benchmark tailored to you, and the transparency to see exactly what’s gone into it, we believe we’ve created a fairer and more accurate way for you to understand your strengths as a leader and what you can do to improve.

True Benchmark® is available today for all existing Peakon customers. You can find all the details on how to enabling the feature for your organisation in the Help Centre, and your customer success manager will be more than happy to give you a personal walk-through of the tool beforehand. If you’re new to Peakon but you’re looking to increase employee engagement in your business, get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to show you how.